In the post yesterday I reported what was generally known about the Horn of Africa, that its populations seem to lie between those of Sub-Saharan African and Eurasia genetically. This is totally reasonable as a function of geography, but there are also suggestions that this is not simply a function of isolation by distance (i.e., populations at position 0.5 on the interval 0.0 to 1.0 would presumably exhibit equal affinities in both directions due to gene flow). For example, you observe the almost total lack of “Bantu” genetic influence on the Semitic and Cushitic populations of the Horn of Africa, and the lack of Eurasian influence in groups to the south and west of the Horn except to some extent the Masai.

Tacking horizontally in terms of discipline, over the past few generations there has been a veritable cottage industry making the case for the recent origin of many ethno-linguistic populations through a process of cultural self-creation. Clearly there are many cases of this, some of them studied in depth by anthropologists (e.g., the shift from Dinka to Nuer identity). But there has been an unfortunate tendency to over-generalize ...

Since I started up the African Ancestry Project one of the primary sources of interest has been from individuals whose family hail for Northeast Africa. More specifically, the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia. The problem seems to be that 23andMe’s “ancestry painting” algorithm uses West African Yoruba as a reference population, and East Africans are often not well modeled as derivative of West Africans. So, for example, the Nubian individual who I’ve analyzed supposedly comes up to be well over 50% “European” in ancestry painting. Then again, I”m 55-60% “European” as well according that method! So we shouldn’t take these judgments to heart too much. Obviously something was off, and thanks to Genome Bloggers like Dienekes Pontikos we know what the problem was: the populations of the Horn of Africa have almost no distinctive “Bantu” element to connect them with West Africans like the Yoruba. Additionally, a closer inspection shows that the “Eurasian” component present in these populations is very specific as well, almost totally derived from Arabian-like sources. When breaking apart the West Eurasian populations it is no surprise ...